ExcelPackage Project - An Open XML Excel Wrapper API

Open-source API for SpreadsheetML documents

More people are starting to build and share open-source APIs around Open XML development.  ...

For .NET developers, the System.IO.Packaging API handles the low-level heavy lifting chores of Open XML development: dealing with OPC packages, relationships, and content types. But once you have those details under control, you're going to have to write a lot of XML markup to create a useful document...

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A great example is the new ExcelPackage project on Codeplex. It was created by Dr. John Tunnicliffe, and he wrote a nice article about it for the OpenXmlDeveloper web site: "Using the Packaging API and Office Open XML to create Excel 2007 files on the server."

John's approach mimics some of the syntax and concepts that have been used in the Excel object model to allow for simple document creation.

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using OfficeOpenXml; // namespace for the ExcelPackage assembly
…
FileInfo newFile = new FileInfo(@"C:\mynewfile.xlsx");
using (ExcelPackage xlPackage = new ExcelPackage(newFile)) { … }
ExcelWorksheet worksheet = xlPackage.Workbook.Worksheets.Add("My Worksheet");
worksheet.Cell(1, 1).Value = "My Data #1";
worksheet.Cell(1, 2).Value = "My Data #2";

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Pretty cool. The ExcelPackage class makes it possible to "think like a spreadsheet" when creating the document, focusing on which cells contain which values, and hiding all the messy details of the underlying XML that is being generated...

That looks pretty cool.

When/if I need to generate XLSx's I want to remember to check this out... One issue I see is that it's licensed under GPL, so using it at work looks problematic.

Still it looks like an interesting project, one that I'll be keeping an eye on.